Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Cassette Review: Paradise Range "Circles in the Wood"

"Circles in the Wood" begins with space bass as it is quiet, eerie and all around just makes me feel like something out of Area 51. It's potentially on the verge of something and then sad strings enter with slight record skips. A vocal sound comes through but it's not quite singing and then a helicopter builds. Laser beats give way to somber synth and then we find ourselves at an audio clip about six words. Those words are: "Turn on. Tune in. Drop out", though the first time I heard them I thought the last two were "Rise up" and I kind of like that better. If you're curious as to what those words mean exactly, who spoke them and all that, a quick internet search will provide you with more answers than I wish to supply here.

Guitar whirrs and funky bass twists take us through the six words portion and then there is another audio clip only this time it is about psychedelic music and the word being used to describe the music is just done by people who are lazy and don't know how else to describe something. It's some interesting points and it turns into a driving guitar sound. This becomes X-Files-like, a very short bit of singing and there are just a lot of loops. Energetic drum beats bring about thoughts of The Go-Go's because, hey, we got the beat, and then it also does become psych rock before a deep ringing comes out like a Storm Trooper march to end the first side.

Side B opens with a back and forth guitar riff which can feel quite hypnotic. An audio clip comes in once again and then the drums become prominent as we move into something out of Doctor Who. Through psych swirls and loops this just has an overall keytar feel to it so far on this side even if a keytar isn't even being used at all. As it gets faster, modem type beep loops come out and this has just turned into full blown electronic rock. A mix of Transformers and "Weird Science", it then has another audio clip as it slows down into electronic psych and this time it is about being alone.

I feel like a lot of new music genres are created and named because they are a combination of existing genres that just need to be simplified, but the end result as we all know is that the music then becomes simplified as well since we will use these terms in such a general sense. Paradise Range is electronic psych rock, which I realize is three words long and there should be a single word to describe them but I'm not going to create one and if one does come into existence I'll probably just stick with the three words because I feel like it's more descriptive even though the genres on their own lend a bit to the imagination. So enjoy this one because it doesn't really sound like anything else out there right now.